by Andy McNab
We got to De Land station just before 2 p.m. The bus was waiting to take us to the coast. After so many hours of air-conditioning on the train, the Florida afternoon hit me as if I'd opened the door of a blast furnace. Both of us were blinking like bats under the clear, oppressive sky. We were surrounded by people wearing tans and summer clothes. The electronic information scroll at the station told us it was ninety-one degrees.
We boarded the hot bus, sat down, and waited for the PVC to stick to our backs as we chugged along the highway to the Daytona Beach bus depot.
It was an uneventful trip. Occasionally from behind us would come the sound of rolling thunder, and a blur of chrome, leather, and sawed-off denim would flash past with the distinctive, explosive bubbling gurgle of a Harley-Davidson. I'd forgotten Daytona Beach was a mecca for bikers. From the bus window, the roadside diners looked black with them.
Two hours later we trundled across the bridge over the inland waterway into downtown Daytona Beach. We peeled ourselves off the seats, and I reclaimed our bag. The first thing I did was buy us two fresh-squeezed orange juices, and as we walked from the shelter of the bus depot I could feel the sunlight burning through my shirt.
At the taxi stand I asked the driver to take us to an ordinary hotel.
"What kind of ordinary?" he asked.
"Cheap" The driver was Latino. Gloria Estefan blasted out of the cassette player; he had a little statue of the Virgin Mary on the dashboard, a picture of his kids hanging off the mirror, and he was wearing a big, loud, flowery shirt de Sabatino would have died for. I rolled my window down and let the breeze hit my face. We turned onto Atlantic Avenue, and I found myself staring at a massive white ribbon of hard-packed sand that stretched to infinity. We drove past diners, beachwear and biker stores, Chinese restaurants, oyster houses, 7-Elevens, parking lots, tacky hotels, then more diners and beachwear stores.
The whole place was built for vacations. Everywhere I turned I saw hotels with brightly colored murals. Nearly all had signs saying spring breakers welcome. There was even a cheerleaders convention going on; I could see scores of girls in skimpy outfits strutting their stuff on a ball field outside the convention center. Maybe Frankie was there, sitting in a corner, ogling.
"Are we there yet?" Kelly asked.
The driver said, "Two more blocks on the left."
I saw all the usual chain hotels, and then ours--the Castaway Hotel.
Standing on the sidewalk outside, listening to Gloria's singing disappearing into the distance, I looked at Kelly and said, "Yeah, I know--crap."
She grinned.
"Triple-decker crap with cheese."
Maybe, but it looked perfect for us. What was more, it was only twenty-four dollars a night, though I could already tell from the outside that we'd get only twenty-four bucks' worth.
I came out with the same old story, plus us being determined still to have our Disney vacation. I didn't think the woman at the desk believed a word I was saying, but she just didn't care, as long as I gave her the cash that went into the front pocket other dirty black jeans.
Our room was a small box with a pane of glass in one wall.
The floor had a layer of dust that it would have been a shame to clean, and the heat bouncing off the cinder block made it feel like the black hole of Calcutta.
"Once the air-conditioning is on it'll be OK.," I said.
"What air-conditioning?" Kelly asked, looking at the bare walls.
She flopped onto the bed. I could swear I heard a thousand bedbugs scream.
"Can we go to the beach?"
I was thinking the same, but the first priority, as ever, was the kit.
"We'll go out soon. Do you want to help me sort every thing out first?"
She seemed happy at the suggestion. I gave her the .45 magazines from the Lorton exit shooting.
"Can you take the bullets out and put them in there?" I pointed to the side pocket of the bag. The mags didn't fit into my Sig, but the rounds were the same.
"Sure" She looked really pleased.
I didn't show her how to do it because I wanted to keep her busy. I hid the backup disk inside the bed, using one of the screwdrivers to rip the mattress lining. I got the washing kit out, had a shower and a shave. The scabs were a dark color now and hard. I got dressed in my new jeans and gray T-shirt.
Then I got Kelly cleaned up too.
It was 4:45. She was still getting dressed in black pants and a green pullover as I leaned over to the cabinet between the two beds and pulled out the telephone book.
"What's this?" I pointed a thumb at the TV " The Big Bad Beetleborgs." "The who?"
She started to explain but I wasn't really listening; I just nodded and agreed and read the phone book.
I was looking for the surname DeNiro. It was a crazy name for him to have chosen, but I remembered that was what he'd renamed himself: Al DeNiro. For somebody who was supposed to spend his life keeping a low profile it wasn't exactly the most secure, but he was Al and Bob's biggest fan. The only reason he'd got involved in the drug scene in the first place was that he'd seen Al Pacino in Scarface. His whole life had been a fantasy. He knew all the dialogue from their films;
he'd even entertained us in Wales with passable impressions.
Sad, but true.
There was no listing under De Niro, A. I tried directory assistance They couldn't help, either. The next step would be to start phoning all around the state or to get a private eye on it with some story, but that was going to take a lot of time and money.
Scratching my butt until I realized Kelly was watching, I walked over to the curtains, and pulled them back. We were two bats in the bat cave again, exposed to the deadly sunlight.
Craning my neck around to the left, I could just about see the ocean view I'd paid an extra five dollars for. People were strewn all over the beach; there was a young couple who couldn't keep their hands off each other, and families, some with tans and others like us, the lily-white ones, who looked like uncooked trench fries. Maybe they'd come on the same train.
I turned to Kelly. She was happy enough that the Beetle-borgs had saved the world again, but looked bored.
"What are we going to do now?" she said.
"I've got to find my friend, but I'm not sure where he lives.
I'm just wondering how to go about it."
"The computer geek you told me about?"
I nodded.
All very nonchalant, she said, "Why don't you try the Net?" She wasn't even looking at me; she was now back to watching the shit on the TV Of course--the bloke is a computer freak, there's no way he's not going to be on the Internet, probably surfing the porn pages for pictures of naked teenagers. It was as good a starting point as any. Better than my private eye idea, anyway.
I walked over to the bag.
"You can use the Net, can you?"
"Sure. We do it at school."
I started to get the laptop out, feeling quite excited about this girl's genius.
I suddenly realized that even if there was an internal modem and Internet software on the laptop, it would be no good to me. I didn't have any credit cards I could use to register with, and I couldn't use the stolen ones because they'd need a billing address. I put the laptop on the bed.
"Good idea," I said, "but I can't do it on this machine."
Still looking at the TV, she was now drinking a warm Minute Maid that had been in the bag, using both hands on the carton so she didn't have to tilt her head and miss anything.
She said, "We'll just have to go to a cyber cafe--when Melissa's phone was out of order, her mommy used to go to the cyber cafe for her email."
"Oh, did she?"
* * * Cybercino was a coffee shop with croissants, doughnuts, and sandwiches, with the addition of office dividers to create small cubicles. In each was a PC, with a little table for food and drink. Pinned on the dividers were notices about session times, how to log on, and little business cards advertising various sites.
; I bought coffee, doughnuts, and a Coke and tried to log on.
In the end I handed the controls to a more skilled pilot. Kelly zoomed off into cyberspace as if it were her own backyard.
"Is he on AOL, MSN, CompuServe, or what?" she demanded.
I didn't have a clue.
She shrugged.
"We'll use a search engine."
Less than a minute later we were visiting a site called Info-Space. Kelly hit the e-mail icon and a dialogue box appeared.
"Last name?"
I spelled out De Niro.
"First name?"
"Al."
"City?"
"Better leave that blank. Just put Florida. He might have moved."
She hit Search, and moments later, up came his e-mail address.
I couldn't believe it. There was even a Send Mail icon, which she hit.
I sent a message saying I wanted to contact Al De Niro-or anyone who was a Pacino/De Niro fan and knew "Nicky Two" from the UK.. That was the nickname de Sabatino had given me. There were three Nicks on the team. I was the second one he'd come in contact with. When we met he would do his Godfather thing, holding out his arms, saying, "Heyyy, Nicky Two" as he gave me a kiss and a hug. Thankfully, he did that to everyone.
The cafe would open the next day at 10 a.m. Our session fee included the use of the Cybercino address, so I signed off by saying that I would log on at 10:15 tomorrow morning to retrieve any messages. The risk that his e-mail was being monitored and somebody could make a connection with "Nicky Two" was minimal.
By now I was hungry for more than doughnuts, and so was Kelly. We walked back toward the main strip and stopped at our favorite restaurant. We ordered to go and ate our Big Macs on the walk back. The temperature was still in the seventies, even at this time of the evening.
"Can't we play miniature golf?" Kelly said. She pointed to what looked like a cross between Disneyland and St. Andrews with trees, waterfalls, a pirate ship, all made to look like a floodlit Treasure Island.
I actually enjoyed it. There was no danger, and the pressure release was tremendous, even though Kelly was cheating.
She started to putt on the eleventh hole. A dragon behind us was blowing out water rather than fire from its cave.
"Nick?"
"What?" I was busy working out how to negotiate the ninety-degree angle I needed to hole the ball.
"Can we see your friend, what's his name David?"
"Maybe some day." I swung, and it didn't work. I was stuck on the water obstacle.
"Do you have any sisters or brothers?"
Where was this going?
"Yes, I have."
"How many?"
I marked my card after six attempts on a par three hole.
"Three brothers." I decided to cut the interrogation.
"They are called... John, Joe, and Jim."
"Oh. How old are they?"
She got me on that one. I didn't even know where they lived, let alone how old they were.
"I don't know really."
"Why not?"
I found it hard to explain because I really didn't know the answer.
"Because." I positioned the ball for her to putt.
"Come on or we'll hold everyone up."
On the way back I felt strangely close to her, and that worried me. She seemed to have latched on to me as a stand-in parent and we'd been together only six days. I couldn't take the place of Kev and Marsha, even if I wanted to. The prospect was too scary.
Next day. It was ice cream for breakfast, then we logged on at ten-fifteen. There was a message waiting for us, telling us to visit a certain chat room. Kelly hit a few keys and there we were. De Sabatino was waiting for us, or at least someone called Big Al was. A dialogue box invited us to a private room for a one-on-one; thank goodness Kelly was there to do the navigating.
I got right down to it. Kelly typed with two fingers: I need your help.
What do you want?
I've got something here that I need you to decode or translate--I'm not entirely sure what it is, but I know you'll be able to do it, What is it? Work?
I needed to get him hooked. For him, half the point of stealing all that money had been the sheer kick of doing it-"the juice." Thinking about it now, Pat had probably got the term from Big Al in the first place. This guy enjoyed putting one over on the big boys; he needed to be involved, to be part of something, and I knew that if I used the right bait, he'd come and see me.
I spoke and she typed: I'm not going to tell you! Believe me, it's good. If you want to look, you'll have to see me. I'm in Daytona. And then I started to lie. Other people say it's impossible.
I thought of you.
He came back at once: What format? I'd got him.
I told him all the details.
He said. Can't see you until 9 tonight. Outside Boot Hill Saloon, Main Street.
I'll be there.
Big Al came back: Yeehaa! Yeehaa!
There was nothing changed about him, then. Kelly logged off, and we paid the twelve dollars. About a hundredth of what a private eye would have cost me.
Now we had hours to kill. We bought sunglasses, and I also got Kelly a fashionable pair of shorts, a T-shirt, and sandals. I had to stay as I was, wearing my shirt over my pants to cover my pistol. The only addition was a bandanna to cover the cut on my forehead. Chrome aviators covered the lower one.
With the wind on our faces, we sauntered along the beach.
It was that time of day when the restaurants were starting to fill up with people wanting early lunches.
Back at the hotel I made some calls to check flights out of the country. If the stuff Big Al decrypted for me seemed to be what Simmonds needed, Kelly and I were out of here. I knew Big Al would have the contacts and resources to get passports for our exit, even money.
We had lunch, followed by eighteen holes with the pirates I let her win and then it was time to start getting ready for the meet.
At about 7:30 the sun started to go down and the street neon came on. Suddenly it was another world, with music pumping out of the stores and the kids now driving up and down the strip faster than the legal ten miles an hour.
I didn't know what it was, the weather maybe, but I felt detached from the situation I was in. It was just the two of us, we were having fun, eating ice cream and walking around looking in shops. Kelly was doing usual kid things, even to the point of spotting something in a store window and doing the "Look at that!" act as in. Hint, hint, are you going to buy it for me? I found myself acting the parent, saying, "No, I think we've had enough for today."
I did worry about her. I felt she should be more upset, shouldn't really be taking it so well. Maybe she hadn't under stood what I'd said to her about her family; maybe her sub conscious was putting a lid on it. At the moment, however, that was exactly what I needed: a child looking and behaving normally.
We stopped outside a toy store. She asked for a ring in the window that glowed in the dark. I lied and said I had no money left.
"Couldn't you steal it for me?" she said.
She was getting into this on-the-run thing too much. We had a serious talk about right and wrong.
It was about a quarter of nine by now; we'd had a pizza, and at that time of night on vacation, the next thing you should always have is a Haagen Dazs. Afterward, we started to wander to the RV with Big Al. We squeezed past ranks of parked motorcycles and jostling crowds, most wearing T-shirts with bike slogans.
I got us into a position from which I could see both approaches to the Boot Hill Saloon from the old graveyard on the other side of the street. It was all that remained of the original town, the only thing that couldn't be ripped apart and have a hotel built on it. As bikers parked and opened the doors, loud rock and roll thundered from the bar. It collided head-on with the Latin and rap that were blaring from the vehicles cruising up and down; it was that body-fluid time of night, and groups of breakers were hanging out of Jeeps and pickups with banks of six or seven
speakers in the back.
Some even had electric blue lights fitted under the car; as they drove past, they looked like hovering spaceships playing music from Mars. I thought about our friends in the Cherokee. I wondered if they'd gotten home yet.
Kelly and I just waited, eating our ice cream and sitting on a bank next to Mrs. J. Mostyn, who went to Our Savior on July 16, 1924, God rest her soul. Main Street wasn't in fact the main drag but a road that led from the sea to a bridge over the inland waterway. Daytona has a bike week each year, and this was the street on which the thousands of bikers descended. It was a one-theme street, and that theme was Harleys. If it wasn't a bike bar, it was a store selling spare parts, helmets, or leather goods. And even when the convention wasn't on, bikes with helmets on the seats were lined up by the dozen outside bars with names like Dirty Harry's or Froggie's, where there was even a bike made of dusty bones in the window.
I could spot Big Al a mile away as he shambled toward us from the direction of the bridge. He was wearing a blue, white, and yellow Hawaiian shirt and pale pink pants, both straining against a body that was even fatter than I remembered;
his outfit was set off by white shoes and the same shaggy hairstyle. He looked like an out-of-work extra from Miami Vice. In his left hand he carried a briefcase, which was a good sign; he'd brought the tools of his trade with him. He ducked into the Main Street Cigar Store and emerged chomping on a huge corona.
He stopped outside the Boot Hill Saloon, Harleys all around him. He put his briefcase down between his feet and stood there sucking his cigar as if he owned the place. Behind him was an enormous mural of a biker on the beach, covering an entire wall of the saloon. A board announced no colors,
CLUB PATCHES, OR LNSIGNIAS.
I nudged Kelly: "See that man over there?"
"Which one?"
"The one with that really big flowery shirt on, the big fat man."
"You mean the geekazoid?"
"What?"
"It's like a double geek."
"Whatever." I grinned.
"He's the man we're going to see."
She said, "Why didn't we wait over there for him?"
